Soggy Bottom

Now that the room is framed, we’re waiting for the house-lifters to de-lift the house. In the meantime, (royal) we are at work on drainage.

The basement floods even in a small rain, so Dan has a two-part strategy involving a French drain and some new downspouts. I probably won’t report voluminously about the downspout part — not that it isn’t intriguing or anything — and will focus instead on the French drain. Here it is in its newly dug trench in the basement:

Here’s the gravel that will cover it:

And here it is, looking invisible.

A drain doesn’t do much good unless it drains into something, so royal-we will install a sump pump. Never in all my years have I owned my very own sump pump! Here’s where Sumpy Allisonovitch’s new quarters will be built:

It started to rain within hours of digging Sumpy’s new home, immediately proving the merit of Dan’s strategy:

That was just a light rain, so it looks as though Sumpy will be one busy little sump pump:

I keep hoping that, with all this digging going on, royal-we will unearth some treasures, but so far this is all that’s surfaced:

After the guys went home for the evening, M and I snuck down to the construction site and explored in places we probably shouldn’t have:

Soon the evidence of the 1913 stairs will get sheer-walled over, so I had to take one last picture:

Just before we said goodbye to the new room for the evening, I took the action shot of M: